Emergent Conversation 24

This essay is part of the series Kurdistan(s): Repression, Resistance, and the Fight for Survival,
PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 24

By Somayeh Rostampour

The slogan Jin, Jiyan, Azadî (Women, Life, Freedom), globally amplified after Iran’s state femicide of Jina (Mahsa) Amini in September 2022, originates within the Kurdish Women’s Liberation Movement, where it has functioned as a core expression of resistance since the early 2000s. Its deployment long predates international recognition; as early as 2002, Kurdish women invoked the slogan during commemorations of femicide, framing victims as martyrs and locating gender-based violence within broader political struggle. Its subversive potential was evident when Turkish authorities banned its use during the 2004 International Women’s Day protests in Bitlis. Following the emergence of Jineolojî’s local epistemology of gender in 2008—an indigenous, anti-Eurocentric, and decolonial framework of women’s liberation distinct from Western feminism, which the Kurdish movement often critiques as imperialist, capitalist, racist, apolitical, elitist, and individualistic—and the Rojava revolution in 2013, the slogan gained prominence in funeral ceremonies for women killed by the state, patriarchal forces, or while fighting ISIS. These ceremonies transformed mourning into revolutionary pedagogy and performance, embedding Jin, Jiyan, Azadî in a transgenerational feminist praxis. The funeral of Jina Amini in Saqqez in 2022 exemplifies this transnational frame, connecting struggles across Rojhelat (Eastern Kurdistan/Iran), Bakur (Northern Kurdistan/Turkey), and Rojava (Western Kurdistan/ Syria) in a shared grammar of resistance.

More than a declaration, Jin, Jiyan, Azadî enacts an ontological and epistemological rupture with patriarchal, statist, and colonial orders. The asymmetry of state violence during the 2022 uprising in Iran, particularly in Kurdistan, underscored this dynamic. As Ghafur Mauludi, the son of a martyr from the 2022 uprising in Rojhelat, noted during his father’s funeral ceremony: “In Tehran, the regime beats people with batons; in Kurdistan, it shoots. Because if it is fascist in the capital, it is an occupying force here in Kurdistan” (Rostampour 2024). Slogans such as “The Mullahs’ regime has no roots in Kurdistan, but it will fall here” and “The liberation of Iran will begin in Kurdistan” reflect a decolonial feminist consciousness forged through marginalization. Rooted in guerrilla warfare, grassroots activism, and daily acts of defiance, the Kurdish women’s movement redefines gender, geography, and freedom as counter-hegemonic constructs. Exemplifying Judith Butler’s (2009) theory of performativity, the movement’s embodied resistance reclaims agency and visibility for lives deemed ungrievable under authoritarian and patriarchal regimes.

Far from playing a peripheral role, Kurdish women have been at the forefront of revolutionary praxis. From Komala, a Maoist Kurdish political organization established in 1979 in Iran, which initially aimed for Kurdish autonomy and social justice through Marxist-Leninist principles, and began integrating women fighters in 1982, (Karimi 2025) to the PKK’s 1990’s reconceptualization of militancy as a feminist project—described as a “women’s revolution within the national revolution” (Dirik 2022)—they have transformed the mountains into both material strongholds and symbolic “zones of liberation” (Rostampour 2025). Jin, Jiyan, Azadî thus emerges as both performative utterance and insurgent feminist epistemology, a living archive of struggle, grounded in aesthetics, protest, and solidarity (Üstündağ 2023).

From the Mountains to the Streets: The Genealogy of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî

The slogan Jin, Jiyan, Azadî constitutes a radical feminist intervention within both Kurdish political history and transnational movements against patriarchy and state violence. Emerging from the ideological evolution of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan, the phrase encapsulates a transformative critique of patriarchy as central to systems of domination. Öcalan’s declaration that “The liberation of Kurdistan is not possible without women’s liberation” marked a rupture with earlier nationalist and Marxist-Leninist paradigms (Öcalan 2013, 8). By the early 2000s, the PKK’s turn toward democratic confederalism emphasized gender liberation, ecological justice, and grassroots democracy (Jongerden 2017).

The formation of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî as a slogan reveals a historically grounded and organic genealogy, generated through the praxis of Kurdish women rather than top-down proclamations. The dyadic formulation Jin  and Jiyan  entered PKK discourse around 1999, with Azadî   added by approximately 2008. Between 1994 and 1998, Abdullah Öcalan frequently used “Woman” and “Life” together, given their shared root in Kurdish, gaining traction especially after the PKK’s 1999 publication of the booklet Jin Jyian (“Women-Life”). By the early 2000s, “Jin, Jiyan” became widely adopted by Kurdish women’s movements in Bakur, predating the addition of Azadî (“freedom”). Freedom, central to the PKK’s gender discourse, symbolized liberation from capitalism, the state, and patriarchy, motivating women’s political and armed struggle. This was embodied in the 1999 slogan “Woman is free, homeland is free,” central to the PKK support conference in Istanbul. Mothers of Kurdistan, justice seekers who lost loved ones, played a pivotal role in spreading “Jin, Jiyan” and later “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” in Bakur. As Kurdistan’s memory, defying oblivion and death, they politicized justice, becoming political subjects and messengers of “life.”

The completed triad was later elevated in Öcalan’s 2016 treatise The Civilizational Crisis in the Middle East, where he described it as a “magical formula” for women’s revolutionary liberation in contexts such as Rojava. However, the slogan’s proliferation across the Kurdish freedom movement emerged primarily through the political labor of Kurdish women—guerrillas, civil society activists, political prisoners, and grieving mothers—who inscribed it into the daily practices and symbolic vocabularies of resistance.

In Bakur (Northern Kurdistan/Turkey), Kurdish women politicized gender-based violence through grassroots mobilization, transcending elite and liberal feminist frameworks. By embedding feminist struggle within broader resistance to class, ethnic, and state violence, they redefined political engagement. This gained institutional expression during the “golden age” of pro-Kurdish municipalities (2004–2015), prior to intensified repression and state-appointed trustees (Drechselová 2018). Women-liberationist municipalism flourished in cases like Bağlar Municipality (2009–2014) (Öztürk 2013), with institutions such as Kardelen Women’s House, cooperatives, and Turkey’s first women-only market (Ekal 2011; Turker 2023). These initiatives operationalized co-mayorship, quotas, and autonomous women’s councils (Çiçek, 2022), enacting Jin, Jiyan, Azadî in practice and contesting depoliticized liberal NGO models.

Simultaneously, Kurdish women in Bakur transformed mourning rituals into acts of political dissent. Public funeral processions for victims of femicide, accompanied by slogans, chants, and ululations, rendered grief a vehicle for collective resistance. The Mothers of the Saturday movement (1995–1999) and the Mothers of Peace (active since 2008) further politicized maternal mourning, creating a counter-memory that challenged state narratives and extended the slogan’s spatial reach to urban centers like Istanbul and eventually transnational platforms (Simşek 2018; Sorma 2023; Göksel 2018). Through public visibility and testimonial speech, these women redefined both death and life as political terrains (Cağlayan 2019; Rostampour 2025).

The 2013 assassination of Kurdish activists in Paris was a pivotal event in the transnationalization of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî. Their killings, interpreted as part of a broader regime of transnational repression, catalyzed Kurdish and international feminist solidarities across Europe. Meanwhile, in Rojava, the slogan became materially instantiated in women’s communes, Jineolojî academies, and self-defense militias, turning a rallying cry into an infrastructure of revolutionary life.

In Bakur, the Free Women’s Movement (Tevgera Jinên Azad, TJA) has led initiatives such as the “100 Reasons to Prosecute Erdoğan for Feminicide” campaign and legal advocacy for imprisoned feminists like Aysel Tuğluk under conditions of systemic surveillance. In Rojava, institutions like Mala Jin (Women’s Houses) practice restorative justice and community mediation, while Jineolojî academies institutionalize Kurdish women’s histories and analytical frameworks. Kurdish women in the diaspora amplify these efforts through multilingual publications, demonstrations, and alliances with movements such as Ni Una Menos (Not One Less), a popular anti-capitalist feminist movement that originated in Argentina in 2015 and advocates for stronger measures to combat violence against women, mobilizing mass strikes and demonstrations. Collectively, these practices constitute a transnational Kurdish feminist movement confronting patriarchal and authoritarian structures both within and beyond the state form.

This praxis notably informed the 2022 uprising in Iran following the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini, wherein Kurdish women in Rojhelat reclaimed the slogan as a rallying cry. The invocation of “Jina” instead of the state-imposed “Mahsa” became a symbolic act of identity reclamation in a context of onomastic erasure (Ghaderi 2023), where having Kurdish names is either illegal or strongly discouraged in Iran. the aftermath of Amini’s death, Kurdish and Turkish feminists organized joint demonstrations in cities like Istanbul and Amed, while Iranian exiles participated in Kurdish feminist conferences in Europe, signaling an emergent transnational praxis rooted in shared experiences of repression and resistance.

This genealogy is deeply enmeshed in earlier revolutionary traditions that have shaped Kurdish feminist consciousness. The ephemeral Republic of Mahabad (1946) represented early aspirations for Kurdish self-determination. The 1979 Iranian Revolution, initially perceived as an anti-imperialist and democratic project, devolved into theocratic authoritarianism, with Kurdish regions particularly targeted, evidenced by Khomeini’s declaration of “Jihad against the Kurds” and Kurdish self-rule. During this period, armed movements like Komala (1979–1991) and the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) embraced gender-inclusive rhetoric and organizational practices. Komala, in particular, fostered women’s participation and promoted internal critiques of patriarchy. In March 1979, Kurdish women in Sanandaj, Marivan, and Kermanshah led mass protests against compulsory veiling laws, echoing parallel mobilizations in Tehran. These actions rejected both Islamic authoritarianism and entrenched patriarchy, foreshadowing the feminist character of the 2022 revolt.

Since 2014, Jin, Jiyan, Azadî has been globally embraced. Feminist collectives in Spain and Catalonia released the anthology Mujer, Vida, Libertad in 2020, and in France, Femmes*, Lutte, Liberté emerged in 2015 to pluralize the slogan’s meanings. Afghan women invoked it during anti-Taliban protests in 2022; Indian feminists deployed it in 2024 against systemic gender-based violence. These appropriations affirm the slogan’s status as a transnational feminist idiom forged from the margins—an insurgent vocabulary of liberation anchored in situated struggle.

However, acknowledging the radical genealogy of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî is essential to safeguard against its instrumentalization. Without this recognition, the slogan risks cooptation by liberal, Orientalist, and Islamophobic feminists in the Global North, as seen in 2014 with the Kurdish resistance against ISIS and again in 2022 during its adoption in Iran. This appropriation strips the slogan of its anti-systemic force, repurposing it through a pro-genocide, imperial feminist lens. Imperialist appropriation of revolutionary symbols, such as when a journalist from a royalist conservative pro-Israel Iranian TV channel (IranInternational) wrote “Woman, Life, Freedom” on the ruins of Gaza in 2024, exemplifies a colonial confiscation, erasing struggles and masking violence.

Meanwhile, U.S. and NATO interventions in Kurdistan, often framed as stabilizing, have reinforced neo-colonial and militaristic dynamics, under the guise of fighting ISIS. These imperial narratives, often Islamophobic, anti-Arab, and sometimes Zionist, serve to legitimize a lasting grip on the Middle East. while the instrumentalization of Kurdish struggles for geopolitical purposes contrasts with their continued criminalization under anti-terrorism pretexts. In response, some Kurdish factions, in an effort to distance themselves from the “terrorist” label, unwittingly adopt imperialist frameworks, weakening the revolutionary and internationalist character of their struggle, as noted by Kurdish activist Dilar Dirik (2024).

Kurdish women’s liberation movement as Decolonial Praxis: Embodied and Territorial Autonomies

Framed through the body-territory lens emerging from decolonial and Indigenous feminist thought (Mignolo & Walsh 2018; Lugones 2007), Jineolojî offers a powerful analytic for examining the entwinement of gendered violence, colonial domination, and ecological extraction. Rejecting liberal and essentialist readings of the body as discrete or apolitical (Ahmed 2006), this framework underscores the interdependence of bodily autonomy and territorial sovereignty. In a region fragmented across hostile nation-states, the Kurdish slogan Jin, Jiyan, Azadî encapsulates a multilayered struggle linking gender liberation with anti-colonial and territorial resistance.

Feminist theorists such as Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen, and von Werlhof (1988) conceptualize women’s bodies as territories of conquest—sites of extraction and control under patriarchal-capitalist regimes. Expanding this metaphor, Gago (2020) shows how violence against women is structurally entwined with extractivist logics that commodify both land and life. In Kurdistan, state-driven ecological degradation—through dam construction, deforestation, and forced displacement (Dinç 2025; Hassaniyan & Sohrabi, 2022)—parallels the regulation of women’s bodies and labor. In response, Rojava’s ecological cooperatives articulate gendered counter-sovereignties through reforestation, communal agriculture, and Jineolojî, weaving environmental and feminist struggles into a shared praxis (Aslan 2021: 149).

Jin, Jiyan, Azadî thus emerges not only as a slogan but as a cartography of resistance, situating women’s liberation within broader struggles against dispossession, ethnonationalism, and ontological erasure. Shirin Alamholi’s trajectory is a powerful illustration of this. Born in Iran, a member of PJAK (Party of Free Life of Kurdistan) and accused of terrorism, she was an active militant in various regions of Kurdistan, including Bakur. Executed in an Iranian prison (Evin) in 2009, she etched “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” on her cell wall before her death. Long before this cry became global, she had already turned it into a weapon of resistance, embodying the transborder struggle of Kurdish women. Despite political fragmentation among Kurdish factions, Kurdish women have elaborated an autonomous organization that transcends party affiliations and national borders. Experiences of gendered violence, authoritarian repression, and ethnic marginalization have forged solidarities among women in Bakur, Rojhelat, and Rojava. In Rojhelat, feminist resistance against the Islamic Republic of Iran confronts both gendered and spatial domination. State policies there aim to erase Kurdish identity and its territorial claims, deploying masculinist logics of control. This is reflected in the regime’s manipulation of public discourse, replacing Jin, Jiyan, Azadî on city walls with slogans such as “Woman, Chastity, Honor” or “Man, Glory, Authority”—a reactionary attempt to reassert patriarchal and nationalist norms. The backlash reveals the subversive potency of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî.

This struggle is rooted in revolutionary continuity. In 2022, the revival of “Kurdistan, the graveyard of fascists”—a 1979 socialist slogan—signals the enduring resonance of subaltern feminist resistance. Ultimately, Jin, Jiyan, Azadî is not merely a slogan but a transnational feminist manifesto forged in guerrilla camps, communes, prisons, and diasporas. It maps a decolonial cartography of life-making against the death-worlds of fascism, imperialism, occupation, and patriarchy.

Somayeh Rostampour is a sociologist specializing in the sociology of mobilization, social movements, and gender studies. Her research focuses on Kurdistan, Iran, and Turkey, with particular attention to the theories and practices of activists involved in intersecting struggles related to gender, ethnicity, and class, as well as revolutionary movements in the Global South.

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